Cracked Baby

We're taking our second daughter, Pearl, downtown to the Center to get her sense knocked into her.

We haven't been looking forward to this, and we're not going to pretend we have. We know it's the only way to make it possible to live with everybody else in today's society, to open her mind, to break down the mental compartments we're all born with, but it doesn't make it any easier.

You remember your own Opening of course. Oh, I'm sorry. You had it done to you as a child, when you can still forget that kind of pain. It's something your generation all go through.

Maybe this just sounds like complaining to you, like I'm grumbling about breathing. It was different for our generation. We took the treatment as adults, so we can make a comparison. We'd had lives we'd lived and become accustomed to before we were Opened.

We could identify the effects upon our individual thinking. Nobody ever knew what to expect; I myself lost my detail memory. Pearl's father needs 25 mg. of Atenolol daily to allow him to function without the attacks of chemical hysteria. I have to leave notes to myself on everything; my calendars and date books are a knot of repetitive cross references.

Pearl's father can't sleep without harmless herbal infusions. He won't take anything stronger; he's addicted to the blood pressure medicine as it is, and can't stand the thought of getting hooked on anything more.

We weren't born like this. We were meant to have Compartments in our brains to keep our thoughts apart. We could harbor and be assured of any of a dozen simultaneous contradictory beliefs, because we could keep them apart, keep them from adulterating the purity, the primitive clarity of uninfected concepts.

We could make war, because we really could put other human beings into the compartment labeled "nonhuman" or "Evil". We could strip them of human lives, human status, we could deny them the idea, in our own minds, of children, of breath and blood and life. We could brand them as vermin, and exterminate them as such.

We can't do that any more. Once you've had your Opening, once they've clamped your small soft childish skull into the Preparation vise, once they've taken the heavy mallets to the fissures--

There I go again; I'm sorry for bringing up the memory for you. They did it to us as adults. Adults remember the pain more clearly. It's the one thing that gets past my fuzzy memory. I haven't asked Pearl's father about it; the people of my generation don't want to discuss it, even though we can't keep it from coming up in our minds; part of the Opening is the ability to see all our thoughts at once, the inability not to be able to see them - but we aren't going to talk about it.

After the Opening, we couldn't keep anything filed separately, not ever again. The difference between before and after is indescribable. Before, our thoughts were steady and regular. We didn't make the quick jumps between facts to reach the unexpected, startling conclusions that you kids take for granted. But after the Opening -- ouch! You know how I mean that.

It was like having the compartments blown down and swept away across the landscape of our heads. Once the fractures were healed (I can see yours across the front of your cranium; your doctor must have been feeling energetic, or maybe the effects of his own Opening were making him nervous), and we'd figured out which painkiller was the one tailored just for our own kind of headache, without causing stomach bleeding or vomiting, we could get down to facing (and I do mean facing) what was happening in our own heads.

You don't know this, because you've been able to do this since you were Opened as a child, but it changed the whole use of our vocabulary. Before, if somebody said "canary" to us, all we would think of was a bird. But afterwards, we thought of a color, a wine, an island, an area of the ocean near Africa. And that automatically pulled up all the files on Wines and Islands and how to Tread Water. Yank out one box of perceptions, and we'd get mental files dumped out in a heap allover the floor of our brains. We felt suddenly insane.

Forget about compartments. Forget about doors on compartments, that we could close or even lock if we felt like it. Forget about shutters or curtains or even walls of rubble. The roof came off. Everything we thought was laid out there for us to see, like the bodies on a battlefield. We could make jumps in logic that would be too high for a show-horse. We were forced to make conclusions using simultaneous ideas that scudded at us from the opposite sides of our brains, conclusions that no one with an unOpened brain would ever be able to conceive of, much less bring to a conclusion. Our minds were no longer a tight neat maze of closed-in concrete bunkers; it was living on a glass prairie. We could get to any point on it without even losing our breath. Our minds maybe.

What am I saying? How could we lose what we could never stop looking at?

But you -- you know this; for you this is how it is, now. You've never known anything else.

Back when my generation was young, back before anybody was Opened on purpose, a friend of mine got Opened naturally. She'd suffered a lot of head trauma. She'd been slammed up and down stairs, and out of unlocked car-doors, until her skull must have looked like a survey map of a golf ball.

She'd grab her head, like she was trying to drive her fingernails into her brain, and snarl "I can't understand how these people can't figure out the simplest ideas, when they have perfectly good brains, while my damaged brain can see everything so clearly!" .

She wasn't crazy. Or convinced of her own superiority. She was just the only person back then who was like everybody is now. She wasn't really alone, but this was before they knew about what Opening did for you. She just seemed to be highly intelligent and inventive to the point of dementia.

One of her co-workers once snapped at her, "You're so stupid! I can't understand anything you say."

Stupid. As Open as she was, and she was called stupid because an unOpen couldn't follow what she was saying. Can you imagine an unOpened mind saying that to an Opened mind today? It would be like a first grade student sulking because he couldn't understand Prepositional Calculus.

Do you know how they made the original discovery? When an artist back in the '90's, who had suffered early head-trauma (said to have hit herself in the head with an ax) started to ask all the creative people around her how many of them had been Hit in the Head. It began as a joke, or maybe just a lay-person's science experiment or census, but then the numbers started to build up.

Every single artist or writer she knew, every Creative Person, had been slammed into a tree, or the forceps, had slipped when they'd been born, or they'd taken a backwards header off the monkey bars into the concrete on the school playground, or a baseball bat across the forehead.

She dropped her findings into a 900-address email discussion group, and the Rest Was History.

All it took was one statistician, a Facebook note (then group), a tweetdeck overload, three hundred newsgroups, 14 articles in Science, the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet (seven versions published on websites), six bestselling authors who appeared on eight different TV talk-shows and innumerable radio broadcasts with featuring actors, artists and dancers with lurid descriptions of their own childhood fractures, innumerable forums, two episodes of The NewX -Files , three corporations that needed a tax break for medical studies donations, and one bank that got a late bailout to back an international research/study/travel grant.

It was all over the media, and once that happens, it's all over but the accounting.

Everybody started taking their kids downtown to get Opened. Kids first. People experiment on their children first; I suppose it goes back to the days when it was the kids who tried out the mushrooms and berries, before adults would try them. Losing a few kids to amitoxins wouldn't harm the breeding population.

It backfired on the older generation; once we couldn't get ahead, couldn't fit in, unless we'd been Opened, we had to go downtown to get it done to ourselves. To your generation, anybody who thinks the way we used to -- who was able to focus and compartmentalize their minds -- must seem crazy. Or at least very limited. They can't make the same jumps.

We used to think that anybody who was Opened, anybody who could dash around through concepts the way everybody does now, must be out of their minds. Only crazy people could think that fast, that's what we thought. Autistic minds. Overwrought minds. Chickens with their heads cut off.

Yes, you're frowning. It was the same way for us; we couldn't imagine what it was like to be Opened, and you can't imagine what it would be like to be unOpened. It's always been a difficult decision for my generation to be Opened, because we knew, from other adults, how much it hurt.

Your generation is luckier, you had it done to you when you were too small to make a decision, or to be asked to make a choice.

Once the Opening became the fashion, you didn't see kids for awhile; they were all at home with their heads bandaged. When they did reemerge, that whine began, the whine that's become the background noise wherever there are children, the sound of children who haven't yet identified their tailored painkillers, whose fractures are still pink and throbbing.

You're asking, what do I mean?

That high-pitched whimper; the one we're always aware of, the moaning of the kids. You don't mean to tell me you can't hear that?

Oh, I understand. Your Opening effect was your hearing. My brother's is a little numbed, too. He's not autistic, but he can be a real navel-gazer sometimes.

Speaking of sounds, there's the first morning siren. Time to be jolted back into focus, and get back to our - as it's called -- non-cerebral activities.

I need to stop by the pharmacy and pick up the usual selection of pain-killers before we go downtown. Pearl's going to need them.